Adobe has issued an emergency security patch for two bugs in its Flash player – after North Korea's hackers were spotted exploiting one of the flaws to spy on people investigating the creepy hermit nation.
At the start of the month, South Korea's Computer Emergency Response Team put the world on alert after it found miscreants …

Research gnomes at IBM Zurich say we should take translation layers off storage devices and run many at the same time on a server to get faster IO.
They have published a research paper discussing this. An SSD has a Flash Translation Layer (FTL), which interfaces between the database and file system concepts on the host system …

How close to reality is the all-flash enterprise data centre?
Depending on infrastructure heritage, appetite and capital available the answer is likely to be: "Closer than you think".
Another question is whether running an all-flash infrastructure is the right choice for your organisation.
Even up to relatively recently an …

Patch Tuesday
In case you've been hiding under a rock for the entirety of this new year (and we don't blame you if you have) there are a handful of major security flaws that have been dominating the news, and feature prominently in this month's Patch Tuesday update load.
First, let's look at the latest developments in the Meltdown/Spectre …

Microsoft has kicked out its December batch of software security fixes, the final Patch Tuesday of 2017.
Redmond has addressed 32 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in Edge, Windows, and Office, as well as a hole in Internet Explorer last seen in the early-oughts. Get patching as soon as possible.
Leading this month's Patch Tuesday …

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Sales of purpose-built storage appliances are falling, markedly, according to IDC, revenue and capacity falling respectively by 16.2 per cent and 14.9 per cent in the analyst’s latest quarterly tracker in September.
Among the culprits responsible for this decline is flash, which is becoming a standard part of the enterprise …

Toshiba has denied a report alleging its NAND flash factories were felled by ransomware.
Taiwan's Digitimes, which often finds news from deep in the supply chain, on Monday reported that Toshiba halted production for three to six weeks while it sorted out a ransomware mess. Doing so, the report suggested, saw production of 100 …

Updated
An absent-minded security staffer just accidentally leaked Adobe's private PGP key onto the internet.
The disclosure was spotted by security researcher Juho Nurminen – who found the key on the Photoshop giant's Product Security Incident Response Team blog, ironically. That contact page should have only included the public PGP …

While much of the tech world is still fixating on Apple's $1,000 face-reading iPhone, administrators are going to be busy testing and deploying this month's Patch Tuesday load.
Microsoft, Adobe, and Google have all released patches to mark the second Tuesday of the month. The updates include fixes for Flash, Edge, Internet …

+Comment
Western Digital boss Steve Milligan has apologised to Toshiba's CEO in an August 11 letter.
The companies have been knocking lumps off each other as WDC tried to delay Toshiba's sale of its interest in the pair's flash foundry joint venture.
Toshiba had threatened to deny WDC access to chips from the foundries. It had said it …

When Adobe this week announced its intention to kill Flash by 2020, a cheer went up among techies everywhere – not least of which were the browser-makers, who seemed pleased to hasten its death on the web.
But others, including Flash game devs and some in the sciences, seem less ready to suit up and deal with the fallout. …

Adobe has officially set a kill date for its beleaguered Flash.
The Photoshop giant said today it plans to end support for the hacker-prone multimedia browser plugin by the end of 2020. This means no more updates for Flash Player after that date and the end of support on many browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer and …

Apple, Amazon and Foxconn are preparing to "chip in" for ailing Toshiba's NAND flash memory chip-making division, according to reports.
Foxconn chairman Terry Gou told Japan's Nikkei Business Daily newspaper that the two American firms would be lending "financial support" to the Chinese manufacturer's bid for the foundry – but …

Western Digital may form a consortium to buy up Toshiba’s hotly disputed NAND flash memory unit, according to reports.
Back in April WD Corporation (WDC) chief exec Steve Milligan said his company was willing to bail out the ailing Tosh. The two firms have been at each other’s throats for months over their joint venture in the …

FedEx is offering customers US$5 to enable Adobe Flash in their browsers.
The offer's being made to users of FedEx Office Print, the custom printing tentacle of the transport company. FedEx Office Print lets customers design posters, signs, manuals, banners and even promotional magnets.
But the web-based config-o-tronic …

The Mozilla Foundation has has given the world the fifty-second version of the Firefox browser, complete with some significant changes.
Most notable is the eviction of plug-ins. The browser will now only run Flash. Anything else reliant on the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) is now verboten. Which means Silverlight, Java and …

Microsoft has begun its 2017 with the release of four updates to address security holes in Windows and Office, while Adobe has posted fixes for more than three dozen vulnerabilities in Flash and Reader.
Microsoft's January patch load includes:
MS17-001, a fix for the Edge browser to address a flaw that would let a malicious …